


To Frenzy

by mistermisstep



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Voldemort Wins, Dark, Drama, F/M, Gen, Horror, POV Second Person, not a shipping fic, things left intentionally untagged
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-01
Updated: 2018-10-01
Packaged: 2019-07-21 03:07:57
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,964
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16151261
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mistermisstep/pseuds/mistermisstep
Summary: Veela are creatures of song, dance, and death. The fires of these three things have lit a blaze in Fleur Delacour, flames that must be fed. Severus Snape has helped stoke them. Let the Death Eaters be her fuel.





	To Frenzy

o

.

o

Men have many names for them — _Iele_ , _Samodiva_ , _Vila_ (this last bastardized into Veela through many countries and centuries) — but none of them capture the true nature of the inhuman blood that beats a wild tempo in her veins quite like the phrase _daughter of Lamia_. She told you exactly that in the beginning, years ago when you both began planning for the end, and it had sounded like a warning then.

Looking at her now, pale and proud and prostrate before a steep dais, the memory clangs like an alarm in your reedy chest. Never before have you been so glad to wear a mask; could anyone see the face beneath it, they would have seen everything in it.

"Rise," says the Dark Lord, and Fleur Delacour does precisely that. Not shuffling or clambering or struggling to her feet, but _rising_ to them with a grace that aches like a dagger in your breast. You are not the only Death Eater so afflicted; all around you is a vista of other figures half-staggered by her natural sensuality. Not all of them are men.

Voldemort smiles down at her from his tall, black throne as if unaffected by her charms. He nods to the tiny phial in front of her.

Further commands are unneeded. She leans down to pluck up the phial, hair spilling over a shoulder to sweep the floor like a curtain of spun moonlight. Though the formless black robes of her station do much to disguise her body, some in the crowded throne room crane their necks for a better look. So too do you lean forward, pretending to be captivated against your will. Then she whips up, head and spine both, hair flying back. Those bright locks settle against her robes, pristine and smooth, as if she had never stooped in the first place. Few things can damage the hair of a Veela. For that reason alone it is a potent weapon, strong enough to wrap around the throat of a man and strangle him, as she had demonstrated once in a way that had left bruises ringed around your neck for weeks.

But the power that she holds is much more than mere strength or beauty. The power is in her blood, and her blood is part of the potion clutched between the pads of her soft, pink fingers.

She takes half a step forward before the Dark Lord's voice stops her.

"First, a volunteer," he says, "to prove its power." His smile resurfaces. "Do not be upset, my darling girl, for even you cannot be fully trusted."

His endearment makes the woman to the left of his throne flinch as if slapped. Like Fleur, she is one of the few unmasked in the massive chamber; unlike Fleur, she does not incline her head in acknowledgment of his disturbingly tender words. No, Bellatrix Lestrange's gaunt face grows ever more like a hideous skull beneath the heat of her burning displeasure, and she fingers the dagger at her belt. A few years ago she might have turned her wand on the younger witch without a second thought, but everyone in the kingdom knows where their Lord's favor currently lies. To move against his "darling" would mean death, and worse.

Still, the sight of it tightens like a fist in your guts. All too often have you tended to the wretched creatures that Bellatrix has spent her anger upon, stitching together skin and bone and muscle with potions, spells, and, when magic fails to fix the smoldering ruins left by her Dark Arts, Muggle means.

Such sickening tasks have taken up most of your hours now that you have fallen into disfavor. An intentional disfavor, one earned through mistakes that are anything but; mistakes that have _Crucio, Crucio, Crucio_ haunting you in sleep almost as often as twitching fingers haunt you in the day; mistakes that left less space for you beside your Lord as Fleur took up more of it. The pain has been worth suffering, for it has brought you here to this very moment where she literally holds the fate of the world in her hand. That you managed to stop shaking long enough to help brew it is one of your few remaining points of pride in a life where dignity is rarer than sunshine in Scotland.

But, oh, your thoughts are wandering, and they should not wander when the Dark Lord is looking at you. His attention is unpleasant, yet not unexpected. A natural consequence of your many failures, and helped along by "concerns" that Fleur has voiced to him over the years.

"Severus," Voldemort says, with a note in his cold voice that beckons you forward through the crush of other Death Eaters. They do not look at you, and that is sure a sign of any as what is to come. All of you can read it in the chill, clinging air.

When you are within a foot of Fleur, he speaks and brings you to a stop. "Our resident potions master — well, _former_ potions master — should be the one to test this elixir, do you not agree?"

Though not a question, you answer as if it is. "Yes, my lord."

Voldemort lifts his white face and casts his red gaze on his followers. "Do you hear that?" he says, his words echoing in the massive, dark space. "Acquiescence, total and complete." His eyes return to you, two embers in a plaster death mask. "Despite his woeful deficiencies of late, Severus Snape has always known exactly when to crawl." There is a flutter of hushed laughter until he adds, "Learn from his example."

All is still. Then pale fingers lifting from the arm of the throne like a spider reaching towards prey. A silent command.

Fleur turns neatly on a heel to you. Pulse in your ears, you reach a trembling hand up to remove your mask — this meeting of the inner circle had been called without prior warning, forcing you to skip a round of your usual treatment potions. Thus you shake. Some small part of that is fear, too, but not for yourself.

Her deep blue eyes soften slightly at the edges. The sight twists the invisible fist harder into your stomach. She will give herself away if she isn't more careful. Bellatrix will see it, or the Dark Lord will, and then everything will be over ...

Premature panic, that.

She hardens the only mask she has ever worn for the Dark Lord, her face, and then glides towards you.

A bitter-sweet aroma reaches your nose, a perfume earned by grinding herbs and flowers for hours on end. It is an intimately familiar scent, your scent, or it had been until your body incurred too much damage for delicate work. You now smell of the tinctures that you drink every day, medicinal brews that largely involve coffee, chocolate, and chalk. _I 'ave no need of sweets with you here,_ she said to you last week in one of those rare snatches of shared secrecy. You told her that her compliments were worse than her noxious potions, but she only responded to your poisonous derision with fingernails and teeth.

(And you had clung to her like a fool, hadn't you? It hadn't been love to make you cling. No, only desperation and selfish need, because a thing like you couldn't love ... or maybe you just hadn't a right to do, and that was the way it should be, the way it had to be.)

She keeps her distance now in front of all these eyes, as if touching you would mean contamination. The contamination of friendliness in a friendless place. And it would mean that. Neither of you need worry about such distance much longer — the end is in sight. A kingdom shall crumble, as it must do, and so many shall crumble with it.

"Your tongue," she says, with a coldness that forces a real flinch out of you. The last time that she had asked for your tongue, it had been for another task entirely, one that you had gladly done. "It must be 'eld out for me."

The weight of too many eyes presses in as you stick out your tongue like a sick child threatened into taking his medicine. The others live for this, the humiliation of anyone who isn't them. It's a feeble pleasure amidst constant uncertainties — the Dark Lord is almost always making someone regret something.

One drop, two, three. That is the best dosage for a man of your inconsiderable weight and height, a dosage that the two of you calculated through months of trial and error. The elixir tastes of smoke, of ashes, of blood, and beneath that, a sharp flavor that makes the hair of your arms press against your sleeves. It is like tasting the edge of an iron blade, cold and metallic at once. The taste of lightning in the air. The taste of silver-white hair curling against your mouth as a lover scores your shoulders and neck with bruising bites. Your fingers flex involuntarily, unable to hold what little they grasp. The mask clatters to the floor and spins away into the shadows.

Her gaze seeks yours, or perhaps you sought hers. It is difficult to tell which one found the other first, for your shaking has ceased and your head is unfogged by pain. Yes, there is strength in the hair and the blood and the flesh of a Veela, a strength that has just slid past your crooked teeth and down your gullet.

"Do as I tell you," she says, "and you shall live."

Those words transport you to seven years ago, back when the war had been lost but the battles still raged.

o

She had been painfully young then, twenty-three and weeping over her dead husband. But what had killed him had killed nearly a dozen others today, and you had no sympathy for a witch too stupid to know when to Apparate. Had any other Death Eater found her in that moment she would have been dead. But you were the one who came to her first, who saw her standing over the bodies of Bill Weasley and Thorfinn Rowle. She flung spells at you and then flung herself when you disarmed her, screaming like a harpy the whole time. It had taken a Full Body-Bind Curse to stop her assault, one that had left you with bloody fingernail marks down your cheeks and wrists.

 _I hadn't known,_ you had told her, _not until it was too late._ That had been as near to an apology as you had come.

She had looked up at you from the floor of the cottage that she shared with her husband, eyes furious and condemning and wounded.

 _The other_ _Weasleys_ _have been destroyed,_ you continued, the words pouring out of you in a rush, for time had been short. _Most of them, anyway; there is no accounting for the dragon-obsessive on the Continent or that thick-headed friend of Potter's. But the others: gone, perished, dead. And many of the Order, too. Potter ..._

Your voice had almost cracked then, not because you mourned the boy, but because you had failed his mother. The one good deed of your life, and you couldn't even see it through.

Yet a chance for something else had come to you here.

 _An improvised attack, one that I had no knowledge of until it had been far too late. Death Eaters shall be here soon, and if you are fortunate, you will attack me and die right here._ You had leant down to make sure that she had heard every word of what you said next, lank hair drifting into your face. _If you are_ _un_ _fortunate, I can let you run and someone else shall track you down and kill you in a way that shall make you beg for death long before it comes._ Another degree lower you had bent, close enough to see the tears trailing down her face and into her hair. _But if you are foolish, then do as I tell you and you shall live._

Her eyes had asked the question she had been unable to speak.

Your answer had been a whisper, deadly and soft. _If you_ _live,_ _then you can help me kill them all._

The plan had come to you the moment that you had seen her standing in the wreckage of her home, with the white-hot inspiration and deviancy that only a practitioner of the Dark Arts could manage to combine. With the near-death of the Order of the Phoenix, there had been few people left to fight the Dark Lord. But being cornered had always driven you to new heights.

Potter had been killed, but you had another weapon in your grasp, the weapon of this woman and her ancestry. Though Voldemort spurned half-breeds in public, he knew well their value in private. Veela had never allied themselves with him, not decades ago and not now, but he would not turn down the opportunity to have one on his side.

She listened to your designs, and then, when asked to blink twice if she agreed to be part of them, had done so. Two fluttering of the eyelids with those near-colorless eyelashes.

After a few heart-pounding moments of frantic preparation, you had ripped all her personal memories from her head, storing them in empty phials plucked from what had once been a storage cupboard. Many False Memory Charms had clouded the space left by her real ones, making it seem as if you had erased everything and everyone she had known. Then you had bound her to you; like a hollow-headed little doll she had spoken oaths and promised fidelity.

Everyone who showed at the cottage that day quickly assumed you had taken her mind and her alliances so you could fuck her, an assumption that you had encouraged.

The Dark Lord had been displeased at first, but you had groveled and begged and assured him in ways that had been nauseating reminders of how you had asked him to spare Lily so long ago.

 _Even a beast like her might play the part in your victory, my lord,_ you had said, bowing before him so that your forehead touched the floor of his audience chamber, your hair pooling beside your face like slicks of oil. _She might be more valuable alive than dead, for the Veela are said to have immortality in their veins. Her former loyalties are of no concern, I swear that to you ..._ Tabula rasa _as she is, she will soon be devoted to the winning side. The only side._ Then you had licked your lips, and added, _And she is very beautiful._

He had stayed silent for a long moment, then agreed, remarking that the nature of Veela had never allowed him to properly dissect the their strange magic — as a whole, their race rarely mingled in the affairs of other ones. Voldemort had both questioned her and tested her on all things Veela, answers that she happily gave.

Her subsequent screams had been less happy, but you took care to erase from her body and mind whatever tortures he had committed. That had been the least you could have done for her. Unlike many of those who served under him, the Dark Lord's appetites never ran to the sexual when it came to his prisoners; his explorations involved vivisection and magical experimentation that gave wounds more easily healed than the mental sort were.

Later, when bored by tests and experiments, he wanted her for reasons nothing to do with knowledge. The things that he asked her to do then were ones that you could neither heal nor erase, not until you both gained freedom. She had told you as much herself. You never asked what she did for him, and she never told, but you had eyes. When he thought no one was looking, he smiled at her with something almost like affection. The love of a master for his pet.

When he had been occupied by other things and other people, you had molded her into the perfect apprentice and Death Eater. You instructed her in magic and potions, skills left untouched by the Memory Charms you had worked upon her, reminding her of how she could defend herself. Use this to poison, this to maim, this to kill.

But between those moments of outward loyalty to the Dark Lord, you had taught her much more. How to guard her mind, how to kill, how to become a monster. And once assured that she could guard her thoughts, you fed her the memories you had taken, returning Fleur Delacour to her drop by drop over a period of months.

With the living members of the Order out of contact and believing you both traitors, you and Fleur clung to each other. It had been a natural thing, the two of you growing close. Unnatural, though, had been her kissing you five years into your alliance, as if kissing Severus Snape was something that women simply did. Despite knowing what you looked like (your eyesight had always been excellent), you had kissed her back.

 _I need you,_ she had said against your cheek, _I want you,_ and you had allowed yourself to believe it.

Somehow, she had managed to make herself believe it, too.

Necessary lies, for the gods required sacrifice of any woman who wished to become a full Veela. In the ancient tradition of Lamia, the biggest sacrifice of all had been that of a child. For Fleur's transformation, that child had to be conceived with genuine love (on at least one side, and you know whose side that is), then ripped from the womb with a silver instrument that would be melted into molten metal and mixed with the fetus and a number of other esoteric components. Ground amethyst. A bowlful of the western wind. A pinch of scales freshly torn from a serpent. A fat-soaked taper set in a tomb for thirteen days. Wings torn from a pure white dove still living at the time of extraction. The resulting potion had taken ten moons to brew, and one second to drink down.

(The same time that it would've taken your child with her to have been born. But that is not a thought that haunts you in the deepest of nights and makes you groan with despair, oh, no, not at all.)

On the last day of the last month, you and she had gone away on the pretense of gathering potions ingredients in some moor or another. What you had really done was watch over her as she drank down that terrible potion, then writhed with agony on the floor of some long-dead Muggle's yawning country house, biting the inside of your mouth bloody every time her bones cracked into new shapes. Afterward, her flesh covered in scales and feathers, she took you and rode you until your body gave out.

Whatever reservations that you had about your plans had died away then, just as you would surely die for her.

She was, in that moment, the most dangerous creature that you had ever known.

o

In the two years since then, in the time that it has taken for her to earn the complete trust of Voldemort, no one save you has seen that half of her. That shall change tonight, has already changed, for the hair of a Veela is a powerful thing. In this case, it is one of the ingredients in the elixir that you have taken. Her blood is another. Such things willingly given bestow protections, ones that shall help you withstand what is to come.

She grasps your chin with one hand, tilting it so you look straight down into her face. Her expression turns satisfied almost in the same moment that her fingernails turn to claws. She faces the Dark Lord, lets go of you, and her mouth opens.

The sounds that leaves her is a thousand knives grinding into a thousand bones. It is no music, but the shrill cry of a predator.

Despite the elixir's protections, you shiver, your heart pounds, and you are ready.

Bellatrix starts forward, a snarl on her face.

You take up your wand, but it is unnecessary. Voldemort strikes first, and Bellatrix drops like a discarded toy at the side of his throne. Above all else, the wizard once known as Tom Riddle is only a man. Those captured by Fleur's allure take down those who are not.

Your wand slashes through the air, Transfiguring pillars out of the grand marble floors to surround you and her. When one crumbles from an errant spell, you replace it. Between the gaps, you see the survivors turn on one another.

On and on this goes, the song shifting into new discordant notes, until there is no sound at all but your own ragged breathing. Fleur carves half the pillars away with one wicked hand, humming as she does so. She saunters up the dais to Voldemort.

The hum in her throat changes, and he points his wand at himself. He Vanishes his clothes, a sight that leaves you seeing more of him than you have ever wanted to see. His naked body is just as hairless and white as the rest of him is. His cock juts out between his thighs like a pallid worm yearning from the earth, but you do not look away from him. You have promised to watch what she does until the end.

She reaches him. Her hand slashes again and again. With each attack, flesh thumps wetly to the floor. Here a finger, there a bicep. An arm flies past your head, one that you barely dodge, and slaps against the pillars behind you. Wounds are cauterized and sealed with wandless magic that fills the room with the scent of burning meat. He does not make a sound when she cuts his legs out from under him.

Lying on the floor without limbs, he looks like a broken statute spattered by red paint. She stops humming, for he cannot hold a wand now.

The tongueless screams of Voldemort fill the void that her voice has left. You cast spells, binding him to the floor with manacles of marble around the stumps of his arms and legs. Though he can hardly escape, it is best not to take chances.

Her work is not yet done. She kneels down beside him and splits his cock in two with a single claw, taking her time to carve straight down the middle of it. His balls she spears from the sac like grapes, pitching them aside carelessly. Her attentions return to his mutilated prick. Half an hour passes as she shreds that meat inch by inch until it is a pile of glistening confetti on his lower belly.

You have swallowed your own vomit several times in a row, and your mouth is sour with the taste of it, yet you still watch. This is what you must do for her.

When finished unmanning him, she starts humming again. His eyes glaze over with fevered devotion. She returns his severed tongue to his mouth, sealing it in place with a sharp, bloody finger. Rolling to her feet, she tips her head at him as if admiring her work.

"Now, darling," she says, in a voice like gravel mixed with sugar, "you must tell me where you 'ave been keeping your little Horcruxes, yes?"

He is helpless but to answer the great and terrible goddess standing before him, just as you are helpless to be hers.

o

.

o

**Author's Note:**

> This is a thing now.  
> (I'm not sure why, either.)


End file.
